There is a time when the game really jumps the shark – a sequence when Sam and Anna visit a collective of tents and caravans where addicts and outcasts have found a community. One of the camp residents was involved in the plot and Sam wants to question this guy, but is not allowed to walk around the campsite anyway. Sam decides to create a distraction by lighting a fire on a large and freshly painted wooden bear that one of the residents carved. As I said, Sam Higgs is an asshole.

As a player, of course, I’m forced to become an accomplice when Sam goes to his mind palace and plans his atrocity. Anna agrees to destroy a woman’s garden hose so that she cannot help with the extinguishing work. This sequence gives me bad vibes on several levels. The whole thing is reminiscent of the completely shameless logic that the late nineties adventure games dealt with, as when agent Brent Halligan in Mystery of the Druids poisoned a homeless man and stole his small change so that he could use the telephone booth. The game seems to try to talk about the widespread pill abuse that plagues American mills, but the story is as short-sighted and banal as it can get. That Sam uses violence against those who are most vulnerable in this whole problem gives a really bad taste in the mouth. Maybe the screenwriter is trying to say something about the fact that things sometimes have to be destroyed in order to be saved or something like that, but it is so ridiculously done that it becomes purely tragicomic.

Our main character’s panic attacks are reduced to silly mini-games and the story lands in a kind of high school idea that social ability goes against the analytical. Dontnod’s games have always had an ability to stay with me for a long time. I think that too Twin Mirror will be there in the back of my mind for a while to come, but not as a nostalgic memory but as a series of questions about how in full swing it could be so harmless, misdirected and sad.

Also read: Review: Life is Strange 2